Reflections About Project 2--> "The Spirit of St. Mary's"

My Reflections about Project 2:

Group Four

By: Renessa Copeland

It was really exciting being able to sit down with the four books and flip through them, taking in all the colors and experience of turning the pages. After looking through my own section of our book ‘The Spirit of St. Mary’s’, overall I was pleased with what I saw, but I think that there are some things that I could have paid more attention to, changed, or fixed. After flipping through the six pages I realized that I still could have sent more time formatting the borders on my page. For me it was a little disturbing that the words were cut off the page, making it harder to read the words. At the same time, I was glad that I made the choice to move the words over one inch from the gutter.

After looking at the second spread, that spelled out SMCM, although I was really pleased with how everything came out, I feel like I could have lighted a few of the faces, because some of the faces were darker making it harder to identify the student who was smiling. I wanted all the images distinguishable. Also after looking at the images on this page, I realized that I should not have duplicated any of the images. I feel like I should have just taken a little more time to take a few more images so that they would not be duplicated. For me it disrupted my flow of looking at the images, because when I got to an image of a person I had already seen, I would look back at the first image and it made viewing the images disjointed.

One think that I really liked and was pleased with was that there was versatility in the picture formatting on the pages. I was glad that I chose not to repeat the exact same order on any page, or that I did not make each page very cluttered, because I think I made if page overly cluttered with visual information then it would have been to stimulating and would have taken away from my idea. What I am still not sure about is if I should have included color. Since the rest of the book relied so much with color, I feel like maybe I should have subtly included the colors, blue and yellow. Maybe making the images that spelled out SMCM monochrome images, in either the color blue or yellow.

As a whole I think that like others in my group have mentioned our topic was to broad and I think that we really branched to far away from our original topic to create a cohesive whole. After looking from one section to the next I feel like the book was not as much as a collective, I think there was to much variability. One thing that really helped to make the book appear to be more cohesive was the use of the division pages. But, I think that we need something within the book, or even on the division pages letting the viewer know how the section represented St. Mary’s. With the opening page followed by images, it was hard to follow why that particular topic, that the person chose to present to represent St. Mary’s, was important.

One thing that really bothered me when looking at our book was the front color. I feel like the front cover colors were contradictory, I am not sure why the front colors were the pastels that were selected. I feel like our claim, in representing St. Mary’s, would have been stronger if the colors in the front cover were St. Mary’s school colors (white, gold, blue, or some variation).
Within the book as a whole I really feel like my section was so different that my group member. I feel like the way I worked with text and images, in no way shape or form flowed with my group members sections. I feel like my section being complicated with words and images disrupted the other sections of the book and interrupted the flow of the book.

Overall I really enjoyed working on this project because it really allowed me to challenge myself. When I began working on this project I realized that what ever avenue that I took I wanted to challenge myself, think outside of the box, and try new ways of working.